17 Books Like The Naked Truth About Harrison Marks

I first became acquainted with this 20th-century classic when it was turned into a popular miniseries, and I felt compelled to read the novel for myself.

Although the narrative traverses settings from London and a great English country house to Europe and even the Americas, the inception of the story is grounded in post-WWI Oxford, where the narrator introduces us to Waugh’s memorably charming but doomed character, Lord Sebastian Flyte.

Waugh’s portrayal of the exuberance of youthful college high-jinx juxtaposed against the perils of dissipation powerfully depicts the inner struggle of his narrator’s search for love, meaning, and ultimately faith.

I greatly admire Waugh’s hauntingly lyrical prose, which vividly captures the aching beauty and mystique of Oxford.

This was only published way after Forster’s death–and I can quite see why: it would have whipped up a storm of unimaginable controversy with its story of homosexual love between two Cambridge students and then (steady yourself!) one of those students in later life and a rough-and-ready groundsman.

Forster wrote this in 1913/14, revised it in the 1930s and again in the 1950s, died in 1970, and Maurice finally appeared in 1971. So the book, which concerns hiding, was deeply hidden for over half a century. Forster is sentimental in terms of love and brutal in terms of fate.

Love bucks polite society’s norms in the face of the danger of arrest, public scandal, and disgrace. But such love is so delicate and dangerous that any affront to it has to be met with the most decisive action to protect everyone involved–even if the price is loneliness and a life-long… show more.

This is really terrible–if highly moreish–stuff: a thin, junky, first-drafty picaresque. But it formed the basis of a film starring Jackie’s sister, Joan. The film even had a tie-in aftershave (heavy on the ginseng), promising all kinds of advantages for the wearer. The film and the book both try to suggest a deluxe, upmarket, classy melding of disco culture with the post-permissive society sexual freedoms now available to the 1970s bachelor and (as an ill-informed nod to feminism) the businesswoman.

This imagined milieu was a million miles from the sleazy, criminal experience of London’s Soho, which had traditionally been where all this erotic access was clustered. The aspiration was shared by Paul Raymond, who worked to translate the risqué stage shows of the 1960s (think pre-fame Christine Keeler) to more contemporary fare for the proto-Thatcherite managerial class, keen to see what secular society had to offer them and their new… show more.

An accidental academic edge and idealistic, boosterish teacher lands Larkin’s non-entity protagonist in Oxford. Behavior degenerates from the tongue-tied comprehensive boy, ill at ease in the louche public school mob, to a fellow hearty and then a rowdy. After that, he becomes a stalker and gradually loses his marbles. Larkin has the protagonist write letters in the voice of the stalkee, Jill, and so imitate the assumed mindset of the innocent young girl primed for romance. Larkin would try something of this intimate interlocution again (passing himself off, as an author, as a retired headmistress) with his eroticized Enid Blyton-like novellas, Trouble at Willow Gables and Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s (dodging lesbian clinches with predatory older girls during late night Latin lessons in the dorms, frequent spankings from the headmistress, etc).

All this is brilliantly comic, proto-Angry Young Man and proto-punk, and counters the chilliness of post-war austerity with… show more.

The cinematic tale of Harrison Marks' nudist feature Naked as Nature Intended, the iconic British him that brought us Pamela Green in her birthday suit. The book features behind-the-scenes exclusives and never-before-seen photographs by Douglas Webb DFM, who was the front gunner on the last plane back from the legendary Dambusters Raid [a.k.a. Operation Chastise] during World War II.

Hoskyns’s biography of The Band takes us on journey. We travel with these five distinct individuals as they form a brotherhood as they back Ronnie Hawkins for tour after tour for some seven years before becoming Bob Dylan’s backup band for a couple of more years. The first two albums, Music from Big Pink and The Band (The Brown Album) are now regarded as classics signaling the advent of a new genre, Americana. However, The Band’s story is ultimately sad as their tight brotherhood unravels in a swirl of drugs, alcohol, exhaustion, jealousies, and accusations. Yet despite all the tumult, Hoskyns celebrates the music.

I love seeing the scraps of paper on which George wrote his songs like "Something" or "While My Guitar Gently Weeps".

I love seeing all his crossings-out and he offers some good commentary too. George comes over as a thoroughly nice person, but you do need strong wrists to read this book. (Gosh, I’m recommending heavy books!)

Boyd experienced an iconic era of rock n roll first hand by being a 1960s model who  married George Harrison after meeting on the set of “A Hard Day’s Night.” The stories of her marriage to Harrison and the A-list rock stars she socialized with, surely would make her the best dinner party guest ever. But if that’s not enough, the second part of the book chronicles her tumultuous marriage to Eric Clapton and ultimately ends with her learning to stand on her own. A truly moving story of strength.

Bear is a slim, easy-to-read story about an archivist who travels to a remote northern cabin to catalog its contents, discovering surprising insights about herself and the world. It is funny, it is insightful. It is also marketed as “a tale of erotic love between an archivist and a bear.” Yup. I promise you, though, that somehow it’s not weird – just delightful and strange and highly enjoyable. 

As a young archivist, did I make my first professional conference presentation about this novel? Yes!

Did it limit my career? 

Possibly! 

Does that paper hold the record for most times “bestiality” was mentioned in an Association of Ontario Archivists conference? 

I hope so!

Thomas’ book taught me that, when we adopt a colonial analysis, we have to rethink every category of analysis: “masculinity” and “femininity,” “heterosexual” and homosexual,” and so on. I also came to accept that there is a deeply sadistic eroticism in all racial and colonial oppression.  

I learned that Western colonialism simultaneously positions African-descended people outside the category “human” while also projecting Western categories of gender and sexuality onto these colonized peoples in order to unjustifiably blame them for the worst behavior imaginable.  

Thomas convinced me that modern theories of gender and sexuality not only fail to provide sufficient critiques of oppression but that they re-inscribe oppressive conceptions of identity by smuggling colonial ideology in the back door, inspiring me to rethink everything I thought I knew about identity.